Review Essay: The Theoretical Normalization of Israel in International Relations

There is something telling about the fact that two books on the political psychology of Israeli leaders and its effects on Israeli foreign policy were published in the same year. The discipline of International Relations (IR) has not been a particularly welcoming place for Israel as a country case study, in part because of a lingering presumption that Israel is too different and therefore cannot be easily used in a comparative framework. There are some exceptions, but these only prove the rule of exclusion. The two books reviewed here are a very welcome addition to the discipline. Equally important, they reflect a recent growing integration of Israel into IR theory development. It is still a small movement, but given that these two texts are steeped in various facets of political psychology—an area that many IR scholars borrow from—they are bound to reverberate within those literatures and in the larger discipline, and bring greater attention to the benefits of Israel as a case study.

The studies by Aronoff and by Ziv offer two further correctives. First, regarding Israeli foreign policy specifically, they serve to reinvigorate the study of the role of individual leaders as determinative of Jerusalem’s foreign policy.¹ This field has been dominated by studies explaining Israeli behavior via the influence of systemic forces,² domestic politics,³ and social identity.⁴ Political psychology is a useful vehicle for studying Israeli leaders, because Israel is particularly well-suited to this approach. Israeli officials and politicians are used to giving interviews, so they are accessible; almost all speak English very well or perfectly; and the informal and open nature of Israeli democracy combined with the contentiousness of its politics facilitates a willingness to talk.

Second, regarding IR theory, both books point out the importance of studying the leader as the main unit of analysis. This offsets decades of emphasis on macro-structural processes and conditions. I am not sure things are as gloomy in recent years as the authors argue, but Ziv (3–4) is certainly right that trends in IR as a discipline have not been kind to individuals as theoretical variables.

The two authors are Israel specialists and IR theorists, and so are well positioned to address all of these concerns. This makes their books important contributions to both IR and to Israel studies.

The authors’ primary concern is to explain change in Israeli foreign policy via psychological changes in Israeli prime ministers. More specifically, they focus on why and how some leaders who start out as hawks later become doves, and thereby move Israel from confrontation to accommodation. Aronoff defines hawks as having “a high threat perception, a low sense of urgency to resolve a dispute, a high predilection to use force, and a belief that the probability of peace is low”, while doves (she also calls them “peacemakers”) “see the adversary’s … aims as limited and somewhat legitimate, and have a lower threat perception. They also believe that accommodation will be reciprocated—whereas aggressive moves can escalate the conflict.” (4) Ziv’s definitions are similar: Hawks are leaders “who [have] an uncompromising attitude in the realm of foreign policy”, and doves are leaders “who [prefer] strategies of accommodation with the adversary”. (9) It is not clear that these terms are useful as descriptive tools today, given the blurring of the lines between various party “camps” in Israel, but as analytical categories they provide the necessary theoretical and empirical purchase.

Yael Aronoff’s Political Psychology of Israeli Prime Ministers sets out a complex model, with several moving parts. She seeks to explain why leaders change their policies on the combined basis of their belief systems (ideology) and personalities. A third pillar of her model is the role of advisors, who channel specific types of information based on their own perceptions. Together these shape a leader’s...